Christopher Hitchens observes that in the War on Islamo-Fascist Terrorism there is no safety in withdrawal: Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.” There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.” But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word “isolationist” at least used to describe something real, even “realistic.” The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.

It may not be a good sign that a PJM Death Pool is up and running. Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Gordon Smith analyses whether Roger L. Simon actually formed a partnership with Dennis the Peasant. By some curious coincidence, hat tip to Ann Althouse.

More than we needed to know department: the frazzled Dennis spills his urine jar.

There is very lame satire to be had from a link supplied by left-wing stalkers of LGF, and slightly more amusing material here.

Better humor: It’s alive! Hat tip to Charles Johnson.
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As to PJM itself, it’s been a week now, and apart from the name change, little seems to be happening. There is a site, whose organization leaves much to be desired, and whose content is very disappointing. Images of one not-very-enthusiastic web programming temp worker in an incubator office in Cleveland come to mind when one tries to imagine who is really running it all.

Best of the Blogs remains a wildly over-optimistic claim. I even tried to help this morning by tipping them off to one of my own more amusing posts, and the result was:

This site encountered an error trying to fulfill your request. The errors were:

Error Type
ValueError
Error Value
invalid literal for int(): 1?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip
Request made at
2005/11/23 07:33:01 US/Pacific

I keep hoping somebody is going to start kicking butts and getting things into gear over there.

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EARLIER REPORTS

America’s East Asian Allies looking at US Congressional behavior and opinion polls are naturally concluding that the US lacks both the leadership and will to win a war with China.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has gone public, warning that the United States would lose any war with China.

“In any case, if tension between the United States and China heightens, if each side pulls the trigger, though it may not be stretched to nuclear weapons, and the wider hostilities expand, I believe America cannot win as it has a civic society that must adhere to the value of respecting lives,” Mr. Ishihara said in an address to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Ishihara said U.S. ground forces, with the exception of the Marines, are “extremely incompetent” and would be unable to stem a Chinese conventional attack. Indeed, he asserted that China would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Asian and American cities—even at the risk of a massive U.S. retaliation.

The governor said the U.S. military could not counter a wave of millions of Chinese soldiers prepared to die in any onslaught against U.S. forces. After 2,000 casualties, he said, the U.S. military would be forced to withdraw.

People living in Taiwan better hope that China is not coming to same conclusion.

Hat tip to Emmy Chang.

The New York Sun has discovered a recent undergraduate fad spreading from Yale (& Brown?) to Columbia: Naked Parties.

Columbia undergraduates are staging parties with one basic ground rule – all guests must part with their clothes upon arrival. The invitation circulating around Morningside Heights bans three additional items: cameras, masks, and “spikey things.”.. A student who attended the party in the spring, Richard Lipkin, said about 80 to 100 naked people – including a fair number of law and business school students – were concentrated in one apartment. Clothes were dumped near the entrance. Women slightly outnumbered men, and people were generally – if not exclusively – good looking, the type who are often more willing to flout culture’s restrictions on nudity.

Mr. Lipkin said he had no recollection of the music that was played.

“It was surprisingly comfortable,” he said. “Most of the people were quite comfortable. Everyone was pretty mature about it. I don’t think anything inappropriate went on. … People were definitely networking, but there wasn’t anything bad going on.”

A novel published last March by recent Yale graduate Natalie Krinsky (Timothy Dwight, 2004) features an account of her fictionalized heroine attending one.

Judith Coburn is cheerleading for Bush’s eventual impeachment over at Moonbat Jones, in an article headlined Worse than Watergate?

The current “One-Party State” seems to preclude hope, Coburn laments. But, still, she notes:

It’s often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected….

Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers’ break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration’s unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration’s imperial modus operandi.

Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience.

We can rely on the Extreme Left to be diligent in consciousness-raising in support of its affiliated Intelligence Community members in their continuing efforts to build momentum, to fan the sparks of L’Affair Plame into a media barnfire adequate to provide the basis to overthrow an elected president.

The White House has dismissed claims that George Bush was talked out of bombing Arab television station al-Jazeera by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And it’s really better to suppose that putting the Voice of Terrorism out of business permanently is one of those small, but important, steps in achieving victory, which the Bush Administration somehow managed to talk itself out of?

George W. Bush ought to take note that (1) he didn’t do it, and (2) the MSM raked him over the coals about it anyway. He might as well just have done it in the first place, since he was going to get attacked over it whether he did or not. There’s a moral here, folks.

and Daffyd ap Hugh has some highly pertinent suggestions. Hat tip to Paul Mirengoff at Power-Line.

My suggestion is that the Bush administration must realize that this is a terribly dangerous situation: at a time of national danger, when we are at war, the CIA has become a rogue agency, uncontrolled by any branch of the federal government. It conducts its own foreign policy; it dictates military policy (through control of the intelligence the Department of Defense needs); it has seized control of a significant portion of the powers of the elected Executive.

It’s time to fight back… and best and quickest way to do so would be for President Bush to direct Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to immediately begin Justice Department investigations of this rash of recent leaks from the CIA, including the decision to allow Joe Wilson to go public with his lying claims in the New York Times about “what [he] didn’t find” in Niger; the leak about the previously secret prison facilities for terrorists; and so forth.

Reporters should be subpoenaed; if they refuse to testify, put them in jail for contempt until they do. Use the full powers of the Patriot Act to seize records and find out who is doing the leaking. And then drop the hammer on them: prosecute them for misuse of classified information or even worse criminal violations. At the very least, get enough evidence to strip them of their security clearances… make it plain that leaking to the press to damage the administration is a career-terminating offense and might even lead to prison time.

Also, be sure to widely publicize the names of leakers as soon as you dredge them up. These people rely upon anonymity; if word gets around that whatever you tell Harry ends up in a Walter Pinkus column tomorrow, the leakers will be shunned by many of the folks who have unwittingly been helping them funnel damaging information to the mainstream leftist media.

Bush can do all of this without Congress lifting a finger. He can do it over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and he doesn’t need any votes from the Democrats.

Heinlein would be mad as hell that he can’t be there.

Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon have responded to naming conflicts and reader disapproval by abandoning the corporately-imposed moniker Open Source Media and going back to the old name Pajamas Media. As one can tell by this blog’s title, I think an insult turned around makes a good blog name.

Ann Althouse takes the occasion to get one in on the still-unresolved content quality issue. Girls can be so mean.

And wouldn’t you know it? Here’s Dennis the Peasant ragging on them too.

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EARLIER REPORTS.

The BBC today, in the manner of journalists and Europeans, was taking the idea of American withdrawal from Iraq proposed by Congressman Murtha seriously. J. Peter Mulhern in American Thinker properly demolishes that kind of thinking:

A victorious nation either establishes a permanent troop presence on the battlefield or it loses the fruits of victory. A win or a draw followed by retreat will always degenerate into a defeat. If there is such a thing as a law of history, this is it. Consider just the few examples from our own short history.

Two hundred and twenty years after the Revolutionary War we still have troops along the east coast of North America. A hundred and sixty years after the Mexican-American War we still have troops in the Southwest. A hundred and forty years after the Civil War we still have troops in the states of the Confederacy. Sixty years after World War II we still have troops in Germany and Japan. Fifty Years after the Korean War we still have troops guarding Seoul.

We left Cuba after occupations in 1906 and 1912 (retaining only the naval base at Guantanamo Bay). Fidel Castro is our reward. We left Europe after World War I and we got World War II. We left Vietnam after we had bought a stalemate with 50,000 lives and the result was our most humiliating defeat.

When you leave, you lose. Defeat is the only exit strategy and in this instance defeat would be catastrophic. The stakes could not be higher.

Alfred Anderson, a member of the famous Black Watch regiment, passed away today at the age of 109. Anderson was the last surviving soldier of WWI to be able to recall hearing the guns fall silent for the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914.

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